{"id":4901,"date":"2012-06-29T07:55:47","date_gmt":"2012-06-29T07:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=4901"},"modified":"2012-07-03T08:59:01","modified_gmt":"2012-07-03T08:59:01","slug":"railway-landslides-in-the-uk-yesterday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2012\/06\/29\/railway-landslides-in-the-uk-yesterday\/","title":{"rendered":"Railway landslides in the UK yesterday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday afternoon a set of unusually intense thunderstorms passed across the north of England and Scotland, bringing short duration but very intense rainfall across a wide area.\u00a0 The result was localised flooding across a wide area and considerable disruption.\u00a0 Perhaps the greatest impact came on the railways, where a series of landslides has blocked lines.\u00a0 The impact of these events is best understood with reference to a map of the rail network in northern England and Scotland:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>You will see that there are only two main lines north from England to Scotland – the East Coast line from Newcastle-upon-Tyne north through Berwick to Edinburgh and the West Coast line through Carlisle.\u00a0 Both of these lines have old alignments – much more than a century old (the East Coast line was completed in 1850 for example) – although clearly the tracks themselves and associated services are much more modern.\u00a0 However, it does mean that the lines have a legacy of old earthworks, which in turn means that despite very considerable investment by the track operator Network Rail they are sometimes vulnerable to small-scale failures during heavy rainfall.\u00a0 Unfortunately the intense rainfall events passed across both lines, and was sufficient to trigger landslides that closed both tracks.<\/p>\n

On the West Coast mainline there were a number of landslides on the line between Carlisle and Oxenholme – Network Rail tweeted<\/a> two images of the problems:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>On the East Coast line, a landslide occurred near to Berwick-Upon-Tweed – again Network Rail tweeted two images of the landslide:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>This morning the West Coast line is open, but the East Coast line remains closed for repairs until tomorrow.<\/p>\n

In addition, there were landslides in a number of places on lines in Scotland.\u00a0 The most serious incident appears to have been at Tulloch on the West Highland Line<\/a>, where a 24 coach train derailed by another landslide.\u00a0 Fortunately the driver was not injured.\u00a0 Network Rail have yet to release any images of that event, which presumably will be investigated by the Rail Accident Investigation Board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intense rainfall brought by thunderstorms triggered multiple landslides on the UK rail network yesterday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":4903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[182,469,959,80,228],"class_list":["post-4901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-england","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-railway","tag-scotland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}